Conspiracy and the Occult

Democracy dies in dankness. A ring of smoke,
it goes wafting to the ceiling of the studios
you share with several twenty-something bros
you sort of knew in college; another toke,
and then the conversation turns baroque:
what if all the mind believes it knows
is just a holograph? can we suppose
that Croatan were aliens at Roanoke?
What were we saying? Yes. Democracy.
Boy-fucking Plato thought it was a bad
idea, mostly, prone to demagogues;
reason crowded out; stupidity
inevitably ascendant; even a mad
king better than a congress of rabid dogs.

I’ve said before that the Democratic Party isn’t really a political party at all, but rather something closer to a think tank—a kind of failed academic enterprise whose principal output is dubious research written in the style of a press release and the occasional bemusing and ineffectual appearance on the cable news. Although they endlessly carp that dastardly Republican gerrymandering has locked them ever out of real legislative power, in point of fact it’s the institution of the Democratic Party that’s benefited. The GOP gave birth to a feisty swamp monster of Tea-Party activism. Convince yourself all you want that this was the result of Koch-Bros astroturfing; in reality, it’s the Republican Party that’s been roiled by primary challenges to established teat-suckers; it’s the Republican Party that’s tossed out its goldfish-mouthed leadership in favor of a class of politicians really committed to exercising power. The Democratic leadership looks hardly different than it has for my entire adult life, a grim and aging collection of Clinton apparatchiks totally secure in their sinecures—all the more so because the only time the party ever does use what power it has, it’s to quash any discontent from its base or its leftward flank. It would be tempting to call it a zombie, but a zombie is living dead; a zombie is compelled by a lustful, powerful hunger. A zombie is all appetite—it is more than alive. The GOP is a zombie. The Democratic Party is a ghost—diaphanous, spooky, and utterly unable to interact with the actual world. At best, it can rattle the pots, or leave a little trail of slime.

The ACA, which may or may not die in the Senate, only ever made sense as an intermediate step toward a universal provision of health care. It was a big, ugly, ungainly, cobbled-together thing that, for all the partisan paeans to its wonderfulness and indispensability, never really worked very well. The part that did work was Medicaid expansion. In other words, the part that worked was the single-payer program that the Democrats so ardently refused—continue to refuse—to endorse. Supposedly the party of incremental progress, they seem to view each increment as the final end state of civilization and history. America Is Already Great, and all that. In order to sell progress as incremental, a series of steps in a journey of miles, there must be some destination in mind, a vision of a truly better society, an ideal. But the Democrats don’t have ideals; they just need you to be scared of Republicans.

Well, fair enough. Republicans are scary, though given the alacrity with which the Democrats rushed to praise Donald Trump for blowing up another little piece of Syria, you have to imagine that this relative terror is a matter of proximity, that the farther you get from the border, the more it appears that the American government moves with an awful unanimity of terrible, singular purpose. Anyway, the thing about the health care debate, such as it is, is that while every Democrat voted no, no one bothered to articulate a compelling alternate vision. Republicans want to kill you! Yes, yes—look, life is a conspiracy against itself; we’re all gonna die. You become inured to this sort of thing after a while. What we want to hear is not that the seas are rising (the Republicans!) and we’re gonna die alone (the Republicans!) and tumorous on the street because our chemo costs $50,000 every half hour and a hangnail is a preexisting condition (the Republicans!). What we want to hear is that there can be a better world, that through collective endeavor we can as a people feed our poor, care for our sick, and find at least some better balance between our rapacity and the health of our planet. Instead we get negation; we get Trump is a meanie and Paul Ryan wants to eat your kids, which does not get the 40% of people whose boss is a meanie and who can’t pay their deductibles to the polls.

The specter of Democrats literally singing in the halls of Congress because they imagine that more than a year from now they’ll reap some reward from the GOP’s pettiness and failure to construct any real alternative system is just despicable. Who are these people? Even if the bill dies in the Senate, even if they take the house in 2018 . . . Liberals accuse the GOP of forgetting about people, of sacrificing public good to the cruel idols of their idées fixes, but it’s the ostensibly liberal party that is actually abstracted from the human mass; it’s Nancy Pelosi for whom this whole thing is just a career. The Republican Party steers the ship of state toward an iceberg, and from below decks, Steny Hoyer gleefully cackles that this sure is gonna reflect badly on the captain. Grab your life vests people, though they may not save you, because the water’s real cold.

This space has been traversed for nearly four months by Jared Kushner, whom I first met about 18 months ago, when he introduced himself after a foreign policy lecture I had given.

-Henry Kissinger

About suffering they were never right,
The Old Ones: how little they understood of fear,
An old man at the mountain when a god draws near
Still mostly pines for a restaurant that’s bright
Enough to read the menu, still delights
That the soup is hot, the winter roads kept clear.
Worshipful terror is for the young, the shear
Effort overwhelms. There was one night
Quite recently when I, arising from
My sleeping soil, called the car and went
To a cocktail party where I met the son-in-law
Of our most recent deity; he seemed
All right. I did not find it evident
That he was yet prepared for Saturn’s maw.
He smiled pleasantly and blankly beamed.

The value of Juicero is more than a glass of cold- pressed juice. Much more. The value is in how easy it is for a frazzled dad to knock the queasy
edge off the half case of Coors Extra Gold
he drank last night because his ex-wife told
him that he’d never keep them. The kids. Her breezy
iPhone alto happy. Remarried a cheesy
real-estate asshole with a Beemer and a billfold.
Fuck you, Kim. “Hey Daddy,” Jaiylyn calls,
“we’re gonna miss the bus.” He sighs and hits
the button. Nothing. The pouch, it seems, is one
day beyond the best-if-used. It all
becomes quite clear. He chews two aspirin, grits
his teeth, and goes to the closet to get his gun.

Leave the seat up. Put the coffee grinds
in the sink. Use the water glass instead
of the wine glass. Leave just a heel of bread.
His secretaries thought him very kind.
His taste in music really was sublime.
His taste in art was lousy, and he mostly read
trash, but it’s true he’d fought well and bled
for his country. He loved his dog. In short, combined
a number of admirable qualities with those
few regrettable decisions that he made;
well, wouldn’t all of us, if forced to choose
between the genteel poverty that goes
with shitty painting and with global war, obey
the sentimental tug, and kill the Jews?

WASHINGTON — An unusual question is capturing the attention of cyberspecialists, Russia experts and Democratic Party leaders in Philadelphia: Is Vladimir V. Putin trying to meddle in the American presidential election?

Out on the summer-melted steppe a cloud
of hungry, black and biting flies now hovers
over the brief wetlands like a lovers’
humming lips at your burning ear, loud
because he’s near to you, because you’ve allowed
yourself to press against him under the warm covers.
But the flies are actually all the whispering others
to whom you—meaning it—also avowed
to be faithful, love and cherish: you promised to keep
his secrets while between you there were no
secrets at all. And then, too soon, the fall
creeps back and the lengthening night brings a deep
and freezing chill, and the flies mate and go
to lay eggs and die. None of them ever call.

The inbox full. The voicemail light is blinking.
Who leaves voicemail anymore? he asks
himself. There are too many red-flagged tasks
today. The boss called off. Sick? He’s drinking
again, for sure, and the worksheet isn’t linking
to the right data set. Each day, he masks
the long-dawned sense: his office is a cask-
et; he is dead already; Death is winking
at his glass door; his new assistant waits
in the wings for the whirring warning. Success? Success-
ion. Years ago he had a home, a wife.
Now he has a list of meeting dates.
When he explodes at last they’ll slap on some fresh
paint and give the next in line his life.

There’s nothing new here. We have known it all
since we grew out of our college commitments;
got our WaPo gigs; became assistants
to undersecretaries; bought our Falls
Church houses; unsolicited, got called
by Blitzer’s harried booker when a different
call-in pundit’s call was dropped. This persistent
shock that gambling’s going on recalls
that scene, you know the one, that quote I can’t
quite place my finger on; but why is it wrong
to give a little courtesy to those
on whom one’s access is dependent, grant
anonymity, bury a strong
lede from time to time, soften one’s prose?

Though in the wild he is not a Muss-
olini, or not quite, he has a dear-
ly bought and bald-headed public fear
that the old order’s order has shaken loose,
the locomotive stalled, the red caboose
has rolled off backward, feckless, foreign, queer;
the goggling passengers try to smile, sneer:
the question of ticket class is too abstruse,
and yet they have been left behind; they are
getting drunk and telling the waiter that
they’re going to have him fired, but their hist-
rionics never leave the dining car.
The bosses don’t care anyway. Back at
the station they quibble over who’s a fascist.